the adventures of a brand-new New Yorker in the entertainment industry

So your first question is: “what’s up with the weird blog title, Becca?”

Well, that’s great question, Anonymus Reader Created For My Convenience. Let me tell you a quirky roundabout story that will take up an entire blog post in order to provide you with an answer. The story, it goeth thusly:

There once was a poem I read my freshman year of high school. I’d give you the title and the author, but those details have been lost to me in the wilderness of memory. The only thing I do remember is that in the poem, the poet was gifted a pair of socks–and these socks were so soft and so treasured by the poet that he kept them forever in a golden birdcage instead of wearing them.

I was so in love with that image that for the longest time my greatest ambition was to find a golden birdcage in which to keep all my socks.

Yeah. Sure. Your pad is pretty swag. But you know what would make it classier? SOCKS. SOCKS WOULD SWAG THAT PLACE RIGHT UP.

Has this ever happened to you? My roommate and I occasionally save up the money to call in a woman to tidy up our apartment — kind of as gift to ourselves when the rush of New York living becomes a bit too overwhelming to get the energy up to clean the living room. Last month, I got a text from her asking if we needed her services any time soon… and I found myself suddenly submerged in an uncomfortable awareness.

The money that my roommate and I save up and set aside for a cleaning — that I usually see as simply “paying for a service” — that money was essential to this woman’s livelihood. In paying her to clean my apartment, I was giving her the means through which she could pay the rent in her own.

It was a sharp moment of emotional clarity about the grander nature of our transaction that sent pinpricks up my arms. I got to thinking. What else might my transactions be directly responsible for? Why had the simple-yet-obvious knowledge of where my money was going been so invisible to me before? And why, now that I’d realized the emotional truth of the transactional nature of money, did I feel so disconcerted by it?

As I tried to answer these questions for myself, I found myself tumbling down a rabbit hole of existential unease (as I’m, apparently, wont to do). The story, it goeth thusly:

Get to work constructing a Parallel Universe Machine so you can hop dimensions?

Take to Facebook and proclaim your undying hatred for bigots and racists and misogynists (oh my!)?

So many choices, you don’t know what to do with yourself, right? Well, I took the liberty of exploring them all for you to save you some time, and have come up with a few tidbits of knowledge to share for the trouble. My first discovery? Two of the three above options are dead ends.

I’m still working on the Probability Drive for the Parallel-Dimension Hopping Machine. I’ll get back to you on that one.

My second discovery is going to take a whole blog post to explain, so bear with me. The story, it goeth thusly:Continue reading →

In the wake of Sara Bareilles’ gorgeous song “Seriously” about Obama’s thoughts on the current election and Donald Trump’s candidacy, I felt the need to speak up and write something.

Today, I noticed a comment from a self-proclaimed Proud Bernie Supporter on my Facebook page. She plans on voting Trump in November. Not because she wants him to be President, but “just to prevent Hillary from getting in office”… and I wondered. What does she hope to accomplish in doing so?

I can’t help thinking that woman is willfully ignoring the glorious display of That-Is-A-Bad-Idea that Britain kindly showed us this year with Brexit — and perhaps casting herself as a righteous avenger for Bernie.

For any of my friends who are considering doing the same, or considering not voting: I’m writing to you, kindly, to ask you to reconsider.

Long time no see, folks! It looks like this “Sharing is Caring” tag is going to be a personal compendium of Things That Give Me Faith In Humanity. So along those lines, I wanted to share something I accidentally tripped over recently.

I’m working on writing a new project–and, as with all my new projects, the process requires me to look like I know what I’m doing. As I work out the basics of the story, I’m doing a bunch of research on things with lovely psychological terms like “mirror neurons”, “antisocial personality disorders”, and “empathic reflection”…

I’m so smart.

…and while doing this research, I found this incredibly touching video. I wanted to share it with you. The story, it goeth thusly:

I find this story so powerful. During a brutal war, this man chose to empathize with his enemy rather than demonize him, and it was that empathy that ultimately saved the day.

A few weeks ago, I had an illuminating experience. And that’s the best sort-of-pun I could come up with after thinking really hard about it for forty minutes. The story, it goeth thusly:

One of the perks of moving to New York is that I’m now living much closer to my family. My brother lives in the city, my parents live within driving distance, and my sister is in the process of moving Somewhere in The General Vicinity of The Eastern Seaboard, Probably.

And that’s not to mention all the members of my extended family, who decided en masse to go west once they realized I was headed back home.

I stumbled across this earlier today and wanted to share it with you. The story, it goeth thusly:

We live in a society of increasing unreality; we text, email, Facebook message. Take photos of our food to share on Instagram.

I made this myself. With ingredients I foraged from the wilderness. And my farm. I put a filter on it to make it look more delicious.

There’s not a lot that’s concrete in life anymore–certainly not for my generation–and sometimes, I feel like we get so saturated with what the internet and the media tell us the world is like, that we need something to remind us of what it actuallyis. I usually reaffirm my faith in humanity by taking a walk outside.

Pictured: Proof that all people are inherently good.

But today, I was scrolling through the pages of carefully-constructed social interactions known as Facebook when I came across something equally life-affirming.